VIRGINIA TECH MASSACRE / MEDIA ETHICS: Tough decisions on how much to show

Matthew B. Stannard, Chronicle Staff Writer

Published
4:00 am PDT, Thursday, April 19, 2007

Grim video sent by the Virginia Tech killer to NBC News led editors, producers and media ethics experts to resume an uncomfortably familiar debate.

"You have to find that line between serving the public's right to know and the obvious public interest in knowing and understanding as much as we can about this person and how such a thing can happen, and being exploited by his manipulation of you," said Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

News organizations have had to walk that line on stories ranging from the publication of the Zodiac killer's letters through the broadcast of al Qaeda terrorists' beheading videos.

NBC, in Rosenstiel's opinion, succeeded in finding that line with its use of videos and other material it received Monday from Cho Seung-Hui, who apparently sent the material during a break in a killing spree that ended with the deaths of 33 people, including Cho himself.

NBC turned the material over to authorities, and later broadcast the video, with Tucker Carlson pronouncing it "the creepiest thing I've seen this year."

"I think people may honestly disagree whether we saw one or two images more often than necessary, but clearly (NBC was) being as sensitive as they could be," Rosenstiel said, noting that the network provided a cautionary prologue and analysis.

Other editors, experts and viewers disagreed, with some saying NBC showed too much of Cho's ranting, and others suggesting it was not enough.

"I get uncomfortable when the media overthinks issues. In most cases, I'd rather share the information with the public and let them decide," he said. "The journalist shouldn't be in the position of playing God and deciding what people need to see and what people don't need to see."

"Editors don't play God. Editors play editors, which means making decisions about what is broadcast and disseminated, and in what context. That's what journalism is all about," he said. "This is the kind of thing better described than shown ... so that it doesn't become sensationalized, which it is now."

Brigitte Nacos, an adjunct professor at Columbia University who specializes in terrorists' use of the media, said she was struck by how much Cho's video resembled those issued by al Qaeda -- a similarity she suspected was intentional.

"This guy is a criminal. He has watched how much publicity people who act for political reasons get. He basically acted in a way that people who commit violence for political reasons do," Nacos said.

She said she was concerned about the possibility of Cho's success in gaining notoriety inspiring other criminals, a concern shared by some other experts who suggested coverage -- including coverage of the ethics of the coverage -- might just feed dangerous flames.

"Most of these guys like this, they're sort of looking for a way to make a statement," said James Garbarino, a psychology professor at Loyola University in Chicago and author of "Lost Boys: Why Our Sons Turn Violent and How We Can Save Them," for which he interviewed many surviving school shooters.

"They're already suicidal, they're already depressed, they have a grievance, and one of the attractive things about doing what he did is you resolve everything at once: You go out in a blaze of glory and make your statement," he said. "The risk of adding to this and providing validation to me ought to sort of trump the educational value of it."

Ceppos and some other experts disagreed, saying that in today's connected world, even if major media wanted to protect troubled young people from disturbing images, they couldn't.

"What are you going to do, tell 1 million bloggers that they shouldn't write anything about this?" Ceppos said. "It wouldn't work, and it shouldn't work."

All of that debate came into play in The Chronicle newsroom Wednesday night, said Editor Phil Bronstein.

"We considered a variety of possibilities, including not using any of the images," he said. "I think not running any pictures of him in a story of this size and scope is a piety. ... We're imposing our own piety about these pictures on our readers if we decide not to run them."

At the same time, Bronstein said, the most startling images of Cho -- dressed in a "Rambo-style" outfit and pointing his guns at the viewer, images on the front of many newspaper and broadcast Web sites Wednesday -- seemed a step too far.

"To me, that is so manufactured. It's real in the sense that he used the guns in a horrible way, but those particular images of him with the guns are such manipulation," he said. "They reflected the image that he wanted to have live on, so we made a decision consciously not to reflect that image."

In the end, Bronstein said, the paper decided to use an image of people reacting to the video as its lead photo on the front page, with three small images of Cho's face below to indicate the killer's emotional swings and the images to which people were reacting.